Sacred Datura

By Julie Jarutic

Eclipse 06, continued

See earlier eclipse posts: "Eclipse trippin'," "Eclipse 06, continued," "Eclipse 06 epilogue," "Top-notch totality," and "Another glance at 3.29's totality..." as well as clusters of eclipse pix at Flickr.



Both from Greek islands
near the Turkish coast


Jordan


Bangladesh


Pakistan


Kazakhstan


Romania


Malta




Brazil



Turkey (note the midday twilight)


unknown location



Libya

Eclipse trippin'

Yesterday's total eclipse
as seen from Russia...

Egypt...

Ghana...

Jordan...

Pakistan...

Ghana again...

Greece...

Bulgaria...

Morocco...

Turkey times three....





Greece once more, times four...







and from the Int'l Space Station,
370 km above Earth.


Additional imagery of the 3.29.2006 eclipse: "Eclipse 06, continued," "Eclipse 06 epilogue," "Top-notch totality," and "Another glance at 3.29's totality..." as well as clusters of eclipse pix at Flickr

"Never doubt in the darkwhat you saw in the light."

"'The weather was perfect,' writes Sky & Telescope executive editor J. Kelly Beatty from about 50 miles south of the oasis of Jalu in east-central Libya. 'Our 146-member TravelQuest/S&T group was joined by about 2,000 other eclipse chasers from around the world. The temperature drop during totality was quite significant. There was also amazing brush detail in the corona — it really took my breath away. Shadow bands were prolonged and obvious, even on the flat sand.

"'We had a visit from one of [Libyan president Moammar] Khadafi's sons, who serves as the minister of tourism. All the Muslims lined up before second contact and prayed throughout totality — with their eyes to the ground! They never got to see the corona. I'm told by the imam who led the prayer that the practice of praying during eclipses goes back to the Prophet Muhammad himself.'"

"Libya, until recently an international pariah, relaxed entry rules to allow in at least 7,000 observers from 47 different countries, and granted special permission for telescopes. The total eclipse reached its peak in Libya, lasting four minutes and seven seconds there.

"Prayers were said in mosques there and in Niger, where Sheikh Amadou Yahaya, a senior cleric, said eclipses 'are omens, a call to order.'

"In Iraq, national television carried pictures of the partial eclipse while in the southern port city of Basra, the faithful went to mosques for a special prayer, called Salat al-Qusuf [or Salat ul-Kusuf --Ed.]. Eclipses are revered in Islam as proof of God's control over the Moon and Sun."

3.29 eclipse video coverage

"On March 29th, a total solar eclipse will be visible from parts of Africa. Scientists from the University of Cape Coast in Ghana will be webcasting live video coverage of this event. Windows to the Universe will be a mirror site for the webcast."


"The Solar eclipse is a magnificant natural event that one can see maybe only once in a lifetime [well, that's not really true; they happen every 18 months... just gotta pack bags to see them -- Ed.]. The last total solar eclipse in Turkey occured on August 11th, 1999, which was observed by hundreds of thousands of local and foreign people. On March 29, 2006, our country will experience another total solar eclipse, which will last almost 4 minutes."


"On Wednesday, March 29, 2006, a total solar eclipse will occur as the moon moves directly between the earth and the sun. The moon's shadow will fall on the earth, first darkening the western shore of Brazil, and then moving across the Atlantic Ocean to make landfall in Ghana, Africa. It will continue moving northeast through Niger, Nigeria, Libya, Egypt, across the Mediterranean and into Turkey, where an Exploratorium team will be waiting."



More 3.29.06 eclipse webcast links here

Taipei to Tokyo,with a stop in South Korea

“Our path to consciousnessmust be found in life.”

"Ariel has found hundreds of what shamans would call power spots using silence and stillness in conditions of extreme heat and light. Black-and-white infrared film has provided her a means to capture her visions. Ariel's study of shamanism has provided a philosophical and metaphysical foundation for her journeys to deserts around the world, but her true insight concerning the vibrational hot spots she has photographed comes from a communication that summons her. According to Ariel, the recordable vibration that is found in all of nature is most pronounced in the desert...

"Ariel has traveled extensively through the American West and has photographed hundreds of locations that represent an expression of the Earth's subtle and invisible energy veins that shamans would call spirits. Shown in this portfolio are the gypsum sand dunes at White Sands National Monument near Alamogardo, New Mexico and the rock surfaces at the Petrified Forest National Park in northeast Arizona."

Greeting the equinox

From a collection of photos
by Elena Kulikova

Now wait one minute... since when has Pluto had three moons?

I know I don't read everything that comes over the wire, but when did that little bit of data get past me?

"Using new Hubble Space Telescope observations, a research team led by Dr. Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and Dr. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute has found that Pluto's three moons are essentially the same color -- boosting the theory that the Pluto system formed in a single, giant collision.

"...the team determined that Pluto's two "new" satellites, discovered in May 2005 and provisionally called S/2005 P 1 and S/2005 P 2, have identical colors to one another and are essentially the same, neutral color as Charon, Pluto's large moon discovered in 1978...

"The new observations were obtained March 2 with the high-resolution channel of the Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The team determined the bodies' colors by comparing the brightness of Pluto and each moon in images taken through a blue filter with those taken through a green/red filter... The new results further strengthen the hypothesis that Pluto and its satellites formed after a collision between two Pluto-sized objects nearly 4.6 billion years ago...

"The Hubble observations were made in support of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006, and will fly through the Pluto system in July 2015, providing the first close-up look at the ninth planet and its moons."

Nebular DNA

"The double helix nebula. The spots are infrared-luminous stars, mostly red giants and red supergiants. Many other stars are present in this region but are too dim to appear, even in this sensitive infrared image."

All I needed was a visa...

...but instead I got a weeklong vacation (of a sort) in Tokyo.

Here's one of the sites we visited:
Atago Jinja shrine in the central city.

Eclipse pics

There was a slight, subtle eclipse of the Moon on Wednesday (in Tokyo; it would've been Tuesday west of Greenwich).

Gordon Parks Sr., 1912-2006

Gordon Parks Sr. was an accomplished author, composer, filmmaker, and internationally renowned and award-winning photojournalist. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912, Parks overcame poverty and racism to master his art. After his mother died when he was in his teens, Parks left Kansas for Minneapolis and supported himself by working as a piano player, busboy, basketball player and Civilian Conservation Corpsman. At the age of 25, he began to seriously consider photography as a career direction...*


By the 1960s, Parks enjoyed status as one of the country's most influential photojournalists. Along with many other projects, he continued his work documenting the civil rights movement in the United States. In 1963, he published the autobiographical novel The Learning Tree, based on recollections of his childhood in Kansas.



In addition to The Learning Tree, Parks has written three other books about his life: A Choice of Weapons, To Smile in Autumn, and Voices in the Mirror. Parks also published several volumes of poetry combined with his photographs, including Gordon Parks: A Poet and His Camera; Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things; Gordon Parks: In Love, Moments Without Proper Names; Arias of Silence; and Glimpses Toward Infinity.


Parks also began to make films in the early 1960s. His award-winning film, based on The Learning Tree, and completed in 1969, was a ground breaking venture. It was one of the first Hollywood motion pictures directed by an African American filmmaker. Parks went on to make Shaft (1971), Leadbelly (1976), Solomon Northup's Odyssey (1984), and a number of other significant films including Flavio; Diary of a Harlem Family; Shaft's Big Score; The Super Cops; and Moments Without Proper Names. His musical compositions of classical, blues, and popular music--including a symphony, sonatas, concertos, and a ballet about the life of Martin Luther King Jr, titled Martin (1989)--have been performed and recorded internationally.

"Gordon Parks: Visions" is a documentary on the artist that my grandfather picked up from the library for me to watch when I was in high school. I did the same, several years later, when I showed the film to a group of elementary school students to whom I taught photography in 2000.

* - "...Struck by the faces of Dust Bowl refugees in Farm Security Administration pictures, and hounded by bigotry himself, Gordon Parks came to understand how to fight the poverty and racism of his past. He chose photography as his principal 'weapon' and spent $7.50 on a pawn-shop camera. He then fell into the Puget Sound off Seattle making his first amateur photographs of seagulls."

From the Tacoma Art Museum's brochure for Half Past Autumn, an exhibit that I viewed in December 2002.


An icon, a pioneer
By Beccy Tanner and Christina M. Woods
The Wichita Eagle

Gordon Parks, who rose from extreme poverty and segregation in Fort Scott to become one of the nation's most distinguished artistic icons, died Tuesday in his apartment in New York City. He was 93.

"We've lost a fantastic person, and I just hope that we're all better for him being here," said Wichita architect Charles McAfee, a close friend of Mr. Parks.

A funeral for Mr. Parks will be held in New York City, said Jill Warford, executive director of the Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity in Fort Scott.

His body will then be brought to Fort Scott for a service, and he will be buried at the Evergreen Cemetery in Fort Scott, next to his parents. The times and dates of the services are pending.

"We have a hard time trying to pigeonhole Gordon Parks because he was excellent in so many areas. He was a renaissance man," said John Edgar Tidwell, an associate professor of English at the University of Kansas who teaches African-American literature.

"He excelled in photography, movie directing, movie score writing, autobiographies, poetry, painting, and the list goes on and on," Tidwell said. "What drove him was the fear of failure."

As a young boy, Mr. Parks and his family were forced to live in an all-black neighborhood, and he attended an all-black school. The memories of those days gave him a hatred of Kansas that he struggled with all his life. It also shaped his art, which showed both the depths of poverty and discrimination and the lives of the famous and powerful.

When he was 15, his mother died and he went to live with his sister in St. Paul, Minn.

Mr. Parks began a career as a documentary photographer after working as a busboy, a pianist and a dining-car waiter on the Northern Pacific Railway.

In 1938 he bought his first camera at a Seattle pawn shop. Within months he had his pictures exhibited in the store windows of the Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis, and he began to specialize in portraits of African-American women.

He also talked his way into making fashion photographs for an exclusive St. Paul clothing store. Marva Louis, the wife of the heavyweight champion Joe Louis, saw his photographs and was so impressed that she suggested that he move to Chicago for better opportunities.

In Chicago, Mr. Parks continued to produce society portraits and fashion images, but he also turned to documenting the slums of the South Side. His efforts gained him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, which he spent as an apprentice with the Farm Security Administration's photography project in Washington.

One of his best-known photographs, taken in 1942, was "American Gothic," which shows Ella Watson, an African-American cleaning woman, standing with her broom and mop in front of an American flag at the Farm Security Administration building.

"Photography," Mr. Parks once wrote, "was the one way I could express myself about discrimination."

From 1948 to 1961, Mr. Parks produced some of the nation's most memorable photographs while on assignment for Life magazine. His photo essays touched on subjects ranging from Harlem gang members to the world of high fashion.

Mr. Parks was a pioneer in the development of American photography after World War II, said David Butler, director of the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University.

"His was a very matter-of-fact approach, where he used very deadpan images, but they pack a lot of punch," Butler said. "He was very good at catching a low moment. It's almost a photojournalism approach, but his work really falls into fine art photography."

Kansas has produced few artists more important than Mr. Parks, Butler said.

"He's an artist that people in Kansas really know about and care about," he said. "I would bet that name means more to people here than any other Kansas artist's name."

The Ulrich has four works acquired from Mr. Parks in 2000: "Negro Woman in Her Bedroom," from 1942; "Uncle James Parks," from 1949; "Department Store, Birmingham, Ala.," from 1956; and "At the Poverty Board, Bessie, Kenneth, Little Richard, Norman Jr. and Ellen," from 1967.

The Wichita Art Museum does not collect photography, said chief curator Stephen Gleissner, "but if we did we would definitely want and have Gordon Parks because he's so good."

"He captured the human experience in a way that, on the one hand, is the kind of largest human experience but, on the other, is done in a way that looks like it's just in the moment," he said.

Mr. Parks was also a writer, publishing eight books and six volumes of poetry. He made seven films.

His first film, "The Learning Tree," based on a book he wrote about growing up amid racial discrimination in Kansas in the 1920s, was made in 1969 and filmed at Fort Scott. The Library of Congress included it on its National Film Registry, which highlights films of cultural, historical or aesthetic importance.

Mr. Parks later produced and directed the films "Shaft" and "Shaft's Big Score."

"Gordon Parks was like the Jackie Robinson of film," Donald Faulkner, the director of the New York State Writers Institute, once said. "He broke ground for a lot of people -- Spike Lee, John Singleton."

But for all his accomplishments, Mr. Parks was known for his humility.

"He was down to earth," said Eric Key, director of the Kansas African American Museum in Wichita. "In 1997 I first started making contact with him. He didn't know me from Adam.... Here was a man with so much stature and such an entourage. I started to call him Mr. Parks. He told me to call him Gordon."

Tidwell, from KU, had similar memories: "He was just the most humble person I ever met."

Those who knew Mr. Parks also were amazed at how he continued to achieve, despite all odds.

"He was somebody who never graduated from high school but distinguished himself in so many ways," Tidwell said. "To me, I think Gordon Parks was one of the most important ambassadors this state has ever seen.... When he left this state, he took a part of Kansas with him. He began to see this state not only as his birthplace, but his rock and source of inspiration. He refueled and energized when he came back to the state."

But it took many years before Mr. Parks could resolve the racial bitterness he felt about Kansas.

The fact that he did, Tidwell said, took him to another level.

"He always talks about the love-hate relationship he had about Kansas.... What he managed to do was find a way of easing the bitterness away from himself. He always said, 'I have a right to be bitter, but I couldn't let bitterness consume me. If bitterness consumed me, I would have lost.' "

It wasn't until the last few decades that Mr. Parks began to return to Kansas regularly. In 1998, he returned to receive the first-ever Distinguished Arts Award from the Kansas Arts Commission. He described the award as more important than his 40 honorary doctoral degrees and dozens of other awards.

"In so much of his work, Kansas is central," Warford said. "He never forgot he was a poor, black kid from Kansas."

Kansas became Mr. Parks' Learning Tree, said Deborah Dandridge, field archivist for the Kansas Collections at the University of Kansas.

"You cannot study the nation's culture without including Kansas and Gordon Parks," Dandridge said. "You can't understand Gordon Parks unless you understand Fort Scott and his experience there."

McAfee said he and Mr. Parks became friends about three decades ago. McAfee was playing in a tennis tournament and Mr. Parks attended.

During a banquet, McAfee invited Mr. Parks to exhibit some of his work at Ulrich Museum at WSU, which McAfee designed. Mr. Parks refused.

McAfee persisted and called WSU officials to set it up.

McAfee remembers Mr. Parks asking, "You really want me to come out there?"

McAfee said, "The rest is history. He came out. We had a number of receptions for him on different trips here at my house.... Kansas is a better place for him, Gordon Parks, having been born here and being buried here."


"I chose my camera as a weapon against all the things I dislike about America--poverty, racism, discrimination."

Gordon Parks: 1912--2006
Social critic was armed with lens
By Michael Wilmington and Mark Jacob
The Chicago Tribune

So said Gordon Parks in his searingly powerful 1966 autobiography "A Choice of Weapons," a bold statement that aptly revealed two sides of this complex, brilliant and ultimately heroic artist: the outward anger against injustice and the love that lay beneath it. Both helped fuel his rise from Kansas rural poverty to world fame.

Parks, who died Tuesday in his New York City home at the age of 93, was a true Renaissance man who had an astonishing array of gifts and talents. He excelled in many areas and lived an improbably full, inspiring and productive life.

He was a subtle and luminous photographer and poet and was director of the action-packed 1971 hit movie "Shaft."

Above all, he was a photographer, one of the legends of his profession. He was the first African-American staff photographer for Life magazine, and later became the first black to direct a major Hollywood movie.

Parks' perfect eye and sensitivity to light and dark revealed themselves in many other fields as well. He was a novelist, poet, journalist, composer of both film scores and classical music (including the 1989 ballet "Martin," about Martin Luther King Jr.) and even, for a while, a semi-pro basketball player.

All his great gifts however, especially his genius for photography and writing, came together in his work in film.

There were other black moviemakers before Parks, notably silent film pioneer Oscar Micheaux, but none that matched his impact in the '60s and '70s. Though Parks directed only five features, two shorts and one television movie, it's not stretching to grant him the place among his fellow African-American filmmakers that is held among whites by John Ford. In films like "The Learning Tree" and "Leadbelly," Parks, like Ford, was a cinematic lyricist and critic of America.

Parks' debut feature, "The Learning Tree" (1969), was adapted from his autobiographical 1963 novel. He wrote the screenplay, composed the score, and directed and produced the film, creating a masterpiece of American cinema. Ignored by too many critics and historians, despite being one of the first 25 films chosen for preservation by America's National Film Registry, it portrays the bigoted world of Parks' youth through the harsh experiences of young alter-ego Newt, played by Kyle Johnson.

Parks' most famous and lucrative movie, a definitive contribution to American pop culture, was "Shaft," that hip, modern, private-eye thriller starring natty Richard Roundtree as the irreverent New York shamus who verbally trashed both crooks and cops, strutting to the pulsing beat of Isaac Hayes' title song. "Shaft" is still watched on DVD and at revivals today. But though it gave Parks brief clout as a movie director in the `70s blaxploitation era before that trend died out, "Shaft" now seems less representative of his gifts than "The Learning Tree."

Parks was born Nov. 30, 1912, in Ft. Scott, Kan., the youngest of 15 children. As a young man, he worked as a piano player in a brothel and as a waiter in a railroad dining car. In his mid-20s, he bought a camera in a pawn shop for $7.50 and eventually became a freelance fashion photographer before training his lens on more serious subjects.

Perhaps his most famous portrait occurred early in his career when he was working for the Farm Security Administration. "American Gothic" in 1942 depicts cleaning lady Ella Watson posed before the American flag holding a mop and broom; it is a bitter parody of Grant Wood's famed painting "American Gothic."

In the 1940s, Parks was part of the Chicago Renaissance that also included such African-American luminaries as dancer Katherine Dunham, writer Richard Wright, musician Nat King Cole and poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Parks printed his photographs in a darkroom in the basement of the South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave.

Parks also worked for Vogue magazine. In 1948, he joined Life. In the next two decades he made a strong social impact with his gritty photo essays on poverty and his depictions of the energy of the civil rights movement.

"Those special problems spawned by poverty and crime touched me more, and I dug into them with more enthusiasm," he said. "Working at them again revealed the superiority of the camera to explore the dilemmas they posed."

His documentation of the underprivileged extended beyond America's borders. In 1961, Life published his photos of a poor Brazilian boy, Flavio da Silva, who was dying of bronchial asthma and malnutrition. Readers responded with donations that saved the boy's life.

Parks later made an acclaimed 1964 short film, "Flavio," based on the story.

Parks' photography was as varied as his life. Along with rough-edged black-and-white urban photojournalism, he produced lush and colorful fashion images and classy portraits of celebrities. In his later years, he used computer technology to create heavily manipulated photo fantasies.

Parks' photography career was featured in "Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks," an exhibit by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington that was featured in 2004 at the Chicago Historical Society.

Parks, who was given a National Medal of Arts from President Ronald Reagan, also helped found Essence magazine for black women in the early 1970s.

His three marriages--to Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and Genevieve Young--ended in divorce. A son from his first marriage, Gordon Parks Jr., who directed 1972's "Superfly" and other movies, died in a 1979 plane crash while scouting locations in Kenya. Parks is survived by his daughter Toni Parks Parson and his son, David, also from his first marriage, and a daughter, Leslie Parks Harding, from his second marriage. He also had five grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

Parks was widely admired by later generations of photographers and made friends with many of them, including some Chicagoans.

"He was a sharing type of person," Tribune photographer Milbert O. Brown recalled. "He was fundamentally a great person. When you think of Gordon Parks as a well-known superstar photographer, writer and director, you would think he was unapproachable. But he was very approachable."

John H. White, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, also recalled Parks' giving nature.

"It was never about Gordon. It was about others. And I think that's the reason that people connected with him," White said. "He would get embarrassed when people would call him `The Renaissance Man.' He would say, `I don't even know how to spell it, but if that's what you think, I'm honored.'"


"Once, he was known as the best -- and for a while, the only -- black photographer in the USA."

Gordon Parks' unique American perspective
By Maria Puente and Jym Wilson
USA Today

But by the time of his death on Tuesday, Gordon Parks was simply one of the outstanding photographers of the 20th century, equally adept at capturing images of poverty or fashion, celebrities or social change, breaking news or contemplative abstractions.

"He was one of photography's Renaissance men," says Arthur Ollman, outgoing director of San Diego's Museum of Photographic Arts. "He understood the camera from both the cinematography point of view and from the photography point of view.

"And he understood Americans from all the different class perspectives. He was comfortable with people who never had anything, and he was comfortable with people who always had everything." (Related story: Gordon Parks, an American legend)

Born in Fort Scott, Kan., in 1912, Parks came to Washington, D.C., in 1942 to work with Farm Security Administration photographer Roy Stryker. Almost immediately, he took what became one of his best-known photographs, that of Ella Watson, a cleaning woman in the FSA office where he had come to work.

In a January 1998 interview for PBS' NewsHour, Parks recalled: "That was my first day in Washington, D.C., in 1942. I had experienced a kind of bigotry and discrimination here that I never expected to experience. And I photographed her after everyone had left the building.

"At first, I asked her about her life, what it was like, and (it was) so disastrous that I felt that I must photograph this woman in a way that would make me feel or make the public feel about what Washington, D.C., was in 1942.

"So I put her before the American flag with a broom in one hand and a mop in another. And I said, 'American Gothic' — that's how I felt at the moment. I didn't care about what anybody else felt. That's what I felt about America and Ella Watson's position inside America."

Parks joined Life magazine in 1948 for the odd counter-assignments of shooting gang wars in Harlem and fashion in Paris. His photo of gang leader Red Jackson captured a myriad of emotions, from despair to determination.

His work for Life documented the Black Revolution of the 1960s in both words and pictures, with pieces on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Eldridge Cleaver.

An enormous retrospective of his life's work, Half Past Autumn, toured the country for seven years, starting in 1998. Philip Brookman, curator of photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and organizer of the exhibit, said the show was "a record of one artist's creative search for humanity in the face of intolerance."

"He was an inspiration for many generations of people, and not only artists," Brookman said Tuesday. "As someone who grew up in an environment of poverty and racism, he made it his mission to end that, and he used art as a weapon to do it."

Parks was charming, amusing, a storyteller, a man with "enormous social facility," Ollman says.

He was the kind of man who could hang out with the New York high-society crowd and Malcolm X (though not at the same time). "There weren't many people who could do that," Ollman says.

"He was equally honest and sincere with all of them, and that shows up in his work, which was about his authentic feelings and those of the people he was photographing."


"I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became devoted to my restlessness."

Filmmaker Gordon Parks Dies at 93
By Polly Anderson
The Associated Press (via WaPo)

Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood's first major black director with "The Learning Tree" and the hit "Shaft," died Tuesday, his family said. He was 93.

Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer, died at his home in New York, according to a former wife, Genevieve Young, and nephew Charles Parks.

He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968.

But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil rights movement.

"Those special problems spawned by poverty and crime touched me more, and I dug into them with more enthusiasm," he said. "Working at them again revealed the superiority of the camera to explore the dilemmas they posed."

In 1961, his photographs in Life of a poor, ailing Brazilian boy named Flavio da Silva brought donations that saved the boy and purchased a new home for him and his family.

"The Learning Tree" was Parks' first film, in 1969. It was based on his 1963 autobiographical novel of the same name, in which the young hero grapples with fear and racism as well as first love and schoolboy triumphs. Parks wrote the score as well as directed.

In 1989, "The Learning Tree" was among the first 25 American movies to be placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. The registry is intended to highlight films of particular cultural, historical or aesthetic importance.

The detective drama "Shaft," which came out in 1971 and starred Richard Roundtree, was a major hit and spawned a series of black-oriented films. Parks himself directed a sequel, "Shaft's Big Score," in 1972, and that same year his son Gordon Jr. directed "Superfly." The younger Parks was killed in a plane crash in 1979.

Roundtree said he had a "sneaking suspicion" that the Shaft character was based on Parks.

"Gordon was the ultimate cool," he said by telephone. "There's no one cooler than Gordon Parks."

Parks also published books of poetry and wrote musical compositions including "Martin," a ballet about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Parks was born Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan., the youngest of 15 children. In his 1990 autobiography, "Voices in the Mirror," he remembered it as a world of racism and poverty, but also a world where his parents gave their children love, discipline and religious faith.

He went through a series of jobs as a teen and young man, including piano player and railroad dining car waiter. The breakthrough came when he was about 25, when he bought a used camera in a pawn shop for $7.50. He became a freelance fashion photographer, went on to Vogue magazine and then to Life in 1948.

"Reflecting now, I realize that, even within the limits of my childhood vision, I was on a search for pride, meanwhile taking measurable glimpses of how certain blacks, who were fed up with racism, rebelled against it," he wrote.

When he accepted an award from Wichita State University in May 1991, he said it was "another step forward in my making peace with Kansas and Kansas making peace with me."

"I dream terrible dreams, terribly violent dreams," he said. "The doctors say it's because I suppressed so much anger and hatred from my youth. I bottled it up and used it constructively."

In his autobiography, he recalled that being Life's only black photographer put him in a peculiar position when he set out to cover the civil rights movement.

"Life magazine was eager to penetrate their ranks for stories, but the black movement thought of Life as just another white establishment out of tune with their cause," he wrote. He said his aim was to become "an objective reporter, but one with a subjective heart."

The story of young Flavio prompted Life readers to send in $30,000, enabling his family to build a home, and Flavio received treatment for his asthma in an American clinic. By the 1970s, he had a family and a job as a security guard, but more recently the home built in 1961 has become overcrowded and run-down.

Still, Flavio stayed in touch with Parks off and on, and in 1997 Parks said, "If I saw him tomorrow in the same conditions, I would do the whole thing over again."

Life's managing editor, Bill Shapiro, said in a statement Tuesday that it had "lost one of its dearest members."

"Gordon was one of the magazine's most accomplished shooters and one of the very greatest American photographers of the 20th century," the statement said. "He moved as easily among the glamorous figures of Hollywood and Paris as he did among the poor in Brazil and the powerful in Washington."

In addition to novels, poetry and his autobiographical writings, Parks' writing credits included nonfiction such as "Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture," 1948, and a 1971 book of essays called "Born Black."

His other film credits included "The Super Cops," 1974; "Leadbelly," 1976; and "Solomon Northup's Odyssey," a TV film from 1984.

Recalling the making of "The Learning Tree," he wrote: "A lot of people of all colors were anxious about the breakthrough, and I was anxious to make the most of it. The wait had been far too long. Just remembering that no black had been given a chance to direct a motion picture in Hollywood since it was established kept me going."

Last month, health concerns had kept Parks from accepting the William Allen White Foundation National Citation in Kansas, but he said in a taped presentation that he still considered the state his home and wanted to be buried in Fort Scott.

Two years ago, Fort Scott Community College established the Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity.

Jill Warford, its executive director, said Tuesday that Parks "had a very rough start in life and he overcame so much, but was such a good person and kind person that he never let the bad things that happened to him make him bitter."

Parks is survived by a son and two daughters, Young said. Funeral arrangements were pending, she said.


"I had a great sense of curiosity and a great sense of just wanting to achieve. I just forgot I was black and walked in and asked for a job and tried to be prepared for what I was asking for."

Gordon Parks, a Master of the Camera, Dies at 93
By Andy Grundberg
The New York Times

Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience and to retell his own personal history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.

His death was announced by Genevieve Young, his former wife and executor. Gordon Parks was the first African-American to work as a staff photographer for Life magazine and the first black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, "The Learning Tree," in 1969.

He developed a large following as a photographer for Life for more than 20 years, and by the time he was 50 he ranked among the most influential image makers of the postwar years. In the 1960's he began to write memoirs, novels, poems and screenplays, which led him to directing films. In addition to "The Learning Tree," he directed the popular action films "Shaft" and "Shaft's Big Score!" In 1970 he helped found Essence magazine and was its editorial director from 1970 to 1973.

An iconoclast, Mr. Parks fashioned a career that resisted categorization. No matter what medium he chose for his self-expression, he sought to challenge stereotypes while still communicating to a large audience. In finding early acclaim as a photographer despite a lack of professional training, he became convinced that he could accomplish whatever he set his mind to. To an astonishing extent, he proved himself right.

Gordon Parks developed his ability to overcome barriers in childhood, facing poverty, prejudice and the death of his mother when he was a teen-ager. Living by his wits during what would have been his high-school years, he came close to being claimed by urban poverty and crime. But his nascent talent, both musical and visual, was his exit visa.

His success as a photographer was largely due to his persistence and persuasiveness in pursuing his subjects, whether they were film stars and socialites or an impoverished slum child in Brazil.

Mr. Parks's years as a contributor to Life, the largest-circulation picture magazine of its day, lasted from 1948 to 1972, and it cemented his reputation as a humanitarian photojournalist and as an artist with an eye for elegance. He specialized in subjects relating to racism, poverty and black urban life, but he also took exemplary pictures of Paris fashions, celebrities and politicians.

"I still don't know exactly who I am," Mr. Parks wrote in his 1979 memoir, "To Smile in Autumn." He added, "I've disappeared into myself so many different ways that I don't know who 'me' is."

Much of his literary energy was channeled into memoirs, in which he mined incidents from his adolescence and early career in an effort to find deeper meaning in them. His talent for telling vivid stories was used to good effect in "The Learning Tree," which he wrote first as a novel and later converted into a screenplay. This was a coming-of-age story about a young black man whose childhood plainly resembled the author's. It was well received when it was published in 1963 and again in 1969, when Warner Brothers released the film version. Mr. Parks wrote, produced and directed the film and wrote the music for its soundtrack. He was also the cinematographer.

"Gordon Parks was like the Jackie Robinson of film," Donald Faulkner, the director of the New York State Writers Institute, once said. "He broke ground for a lot of people — Spike Lee, John Singleton."

Mr. Parks's subsequent films, "Shaft" (1971) and "Shaft's Big Score!" (1972), were prototypes for what became known as blaxploitation films. Among Mr. Park's other accomplishments were a second novel, four books of memoirs, four volumes of poetry, a ballet and several orchestral scores. As a photographer Mr. Parks combined a devotion to documentary realism with a knack for making his own feelings self-evident. The style he favored was derived from the Depression-era photography project of the Farm Security Administration, which he joined in 1942 at the age of 30.

Perhaps his best-known photograph, which he titled "American Gothic," was taken during his brief time with the agency; it shows a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Mr. Parks wanted the picture to speak to the existence of racial bigotry and inequality in the nation's capital. He was in an angry mood when he asked the woman to pose, having earlier been refused service at a clothing store, a movie theater and a restaurant.

Anger at social inequity was at the root of many of Mr. Parks's best photographic stories, including his most famous Life article, which focused on a desperately sick boy living in a miserable Rio de Janeiro slum. Mr. Parks described the plight of the boy, Flavio da Silva, in realistic detail. In one photograph Flavio lies in bed, looking close to death. In another he sits behind his baby brother, stuffing food into the baby's mouth while the baby reaches his wet, dirty hands into the dish for more food.

Mr. Parks's pictures of Flavio's life created a groundswell of public response when they were published in 1961. Life's readers sent some $30,000 in contributions, and the magazine arranged to have the boy flown to Denver for medical treatment for asthma and paid for a new home in Rio for his family.

Mr. Parks credited his first awareness of the power of the photographic image to the pictures taken by his predecessors at the Farm Security Administration, including Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn. He first saw their photographs of migrant workers in a magazine he picked up while working as a waiter in a railroad car. "I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs," he told an interviewer in 1999. "I knew at that point I had to have a camera."

Many of Mr. Parks's early photo essays for Life, like his 1948 story of a Harlem youth gang called the Midtowners, were a revelation for many of the magazine's predominantly white readers and a confirmation for Mr. Parks of the camera's power to shape public discussion.

But Mr. Parks made his mark mainly with memorable single images within his essays, like "American Gothic," which were iconic in the manner of posters. His portraits of Malcolm X (1963), Muhammad Ali (1970) and the exiled Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver (1970) evoked the styles and strengths of black leadership in the turbulent transition from civil rights to black militancy.

But at Life, Mr. Parks also used his camera for less politicized, more conventional ends, photographing the socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, who became his friend; a fashionable Parisian in a veiled hat puffing hard on her cigarette, and Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini at the beginning of their notorious love affair.

On his own time he photographed female nudes in a style akin to that of Baroque painting, experimented with double-exposing color film and recorded pastoral scenes that evoke the pictorial style of early-20-century art photography.

Much as his best pictures aspired to be metaphors, Mr. Parks shaped his own life story as a cautionary tale about overcoming racism, poverty and a lack of formal education. It was a project he pursued in his memoirs and in his novel; all freely mix documentary realism with a fictional sensibility.

The first version of his autobiography was "A Choice of Weapons" (1966), which was followed by "To Smile in Autumn" (1979) and "Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography" (1990). The most recent account of his life appeared in 1997 in "Half Past Autumn" (Little, Brown), a companion to a traveling exhibition of his photographs.

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan. He was the youngest of 15 children born to a tenant farmer, Andrew Jackson Parks, and the former Sarah Ross. Although mired in poverty and threatened by segregation and the violence it engendered, the family was bound by Sarah Parks's strong conviction that dignity and hard work could overcome bigotry.

Young Gordon's security ended when his mother died. He was sent to St. Paul, Minn., to live with the family of an older sister. But the arrangement lasted only a few weeks; during a quarrel, Mr. Parks's brother-in-law threw him out of the house. Mr. Parks learned to survive on the streets, using his untutored musical gifts to find work as a piano player in a brothel and later as the singer for a big band. He attended high school in St. Paul but never graduated.

In 1933 he married a longtime sweetheart, Sally Alvis, and they soon had a child, Gordon Jr. While his family stayed near his wife's relatives in Minneapolis, Mr. Parks traveled widely to find work during the Depression.

He joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, toured as a semi-pro basketball player and worked as a busboy and waiter. It was while he was a waiter on the North Coast Limited, a train that ran between Chicago and Seattle, that he picked up a magazine discarded by a passenger and saw for the first time the documentary pictures of Lange, Rothstein and the other photographers of the Farm Security Administration.

In 1938 Mr. Parks purchased his first camera at a Seattle pawn shop. Within months he had his pictures exhibited in the store windows of the Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis, and he began to specialize in portraits of African-American women.

He also talked his way into making fashion photographs for an exclusive St. Paul clothing store. Marva Louis, the elegant wife of the heavyweight champion Joe Louis, chanced to see his photographs and was so impressed that she suggested that he move to Chicago for better opportunities to do more of them.

In Chicago Mr. Parks continued to produce society portraits and fashion images, but he also turned to documenting the slums of the South Side. His efforts gained him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, which he spent as an apprentice with the Farm Security Administration's photography project in Washington under its director, Roy Stryker.

In 1943, with World War II under way, the farm agency was disbanded and Stryker's project was transferred to the Office of War Information (O.W.I.). Mr. Parks became a correspondent for the O.W.I. photographing the 332d Fighter Group, an all-black unit based near Detroit. Unable to accompany the pilots overseas, he relocated to Harlem to search for freelance assignments.

In 1944 Alexander Liberman, then art director of Vogue, asked him to photograph women's fashions, and Mr. Parks's pictures appeared regularly in the magazine for five years. Mr. Parks's simultaneous pursuit of the worlds of beauty and of tough urban textures made him a natural for Life magazine. After talking himself into an audience with Wilson Hicks, Life's fabled photo editor, he emerged with two plum assignments: one to create a photo essay on gang wars in Harlem, the other to photograph the latest Paris collections.

Life often assigned Mr. Parks to subjects that would have been difficult or impossible for a white photojournalist to carry out, such as the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panther Party. But Mr. Parks also enjoyed making definitive portraits of Barbra Streisand, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. From 1949 to 1951 he was assigned to the magazine's bureau in Paris, where he photographed everything from Marshal Pétain's funeral to scenes of everyday life. While in Paris he socialized with the expatriate author Richard Wright and wrote his first piano concerto, using a musical notation system of his own devising.

As the sole black photographer on Life's masthead in the 1960's, Mr. Parks was frequently characterized by black militants as a man willing to work for the oppressor. In the mid-1960's he declined to endorse a protest against the magazine by a number of black photographers, including Roy DeCarava, who said they felt that the editorial assignment staff discriminated against them. Mr. DeCarava never forgave him.

At the same time, according to Mr. Parks's memoirs, Life's editors came to question his ability to be objective. "I was black," he noted in "Half Past Autumn," "and my sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the country."

In 1962, at the suggestion of Carl Mydans, a fellow Life photographer, Mr. Parks began to write a story based on his memories of his childhood in Kansas. The story became the novel "The Learning Tree," and its success opened new horizons, leading him to write his first memoir, "A Choice of Weapons"; to combine his photographs and poems in a book called "A Poet and His Camera" (1968) and, most significantly, to become a film director, with the movie version of "The Learning Tree" in 1969.

Mr. Parks's second film, "Shaft," released in 1971, was a hit of a different order. Ushering in an onslaught of genre movies in which black protagonists played leading roles in violent, urban crime dramas, "Shaft" was both a commercial blockbuster and a racial breakthrough. Its hero, John Shaft, played by Richard Roundtree, was a wily private eye whose success came from operating in the interstices of organized crime and the law. Isaac Hayes won an Oscar for the theme music, and the title song became a pop hit.

After the successful "Shaft" sequel in 1972 and a comedy called "The Super Cops" (1974), Mr. Parks's Hollywood career sputtered to a halt with the film "Leadbelly" (1976). Intended as an homage to the folk singer Huddie Ledbetter, who died in 1949, the movie was both a critical and a box-office failure. Afterward Mr. Parks made films only for television.

After departing Life in 1972, the year the magazine shut down as a weekly, Mr. Parks continued to write and compose. His second novel, "Shannon" (1981), about Irish immigrants at the beginning of the century, is the least autobiographical of his writing. He wrote the music and the libretto for the 1989 ballet "Martin," a tribute to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., choreographed by Rael Lamb.

He also continued to photograph. But much of Mr. Parks's artistic energy in the 1980's and 1990's was spent summing up his productive years with the camera. In 1987, the first major retrospective exhibition of his photographs was organized by the New York Public Library and the Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University.

The more recent retrospective, "Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks," was organized in 1997 by the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington. It later traveled to New York and to other cities. Many honors came Mr. Parks's way, including a National Medal of Arts award from President Ronald Reagan in 1988. The man who never finished high school was a recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and universities in the United States and England.

His marriages to Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and Genevieve Young ended in divorce. A son from his first marriage, Gordon Parks Jr., died in 1979 in a plane crash while making a movie in Kenya. He is survived by his daughter Toni Parks Parson and his son David, also from his first marriage, and a daughter, Leslie Parks Harding, from his second marriage; five grandchildren; and five great grandchildren.

"I'm in a sense sort of a rare bird," Mr. Parks said in an interview in The New York Times in 1997. "I suppose a lot of it depended on my determination not to let discrimination stop me." He never forgot that one of his teachers told her students not to waste their parents' money on college because they would end up as porters or maids anyway. He dedicated one honorary degree to her because he had been so eager to prove her wrong.

Ali Ibrahim (Farka) Toure, 1939-2006

This is one of two long posts of remembrance for today. Gordon Parks also died on March 7.

Updated 7:30 p.m., March 8:

"World Circuit Records, his label, said Toure had just completed work on a new solo album.


"More than anything else, Ali Farka Toure wanted to show me his farm. At first I did not understand why."

My memories of Ali Farka Toure
By Joan Baxter
BBC News Online

I had come to his home to find out why he had turned his back on the glamour and luxury that was his for the taking after he won his first Grammy award and the world "discovered" the Malian Blues man.

I wanted to know why he had moved back to his native village, Niafunke, about 80km (50 miles) upstream from the fabled ancient city of Timbuktu on the Niger River.

Instead of answering my questions, Ali Farka insisted we take a trip in his river canoe to see what he was cultivating in the dry and sandy soils of northern Mali.

To me, his farm did not look all that promising. I had trouble keeping up with him as he strode across the barren, windswept fields where he said he would produce irrigated rice.

The desert winds had killed his banana plants and 1,500 fruit trees in a would-be orchard. The potatoes he dug up with his bare hands had been devoured by termites.

None of this seemed to dampen his enthusiasm for his 40-hectare (99-acre) farm, which he said would transform the area into a food basket, and feed his extended family and dozens of other people in Niafunke.

Although he did not tell me himself, I had learned he had also spent his own money grading the roads, putting in sewer canals and fuelling a generator that provided the impoverished town with electricity.

He told me his money was "all gone". He did not seem particularly worried about it.

It was not until we were on our way back across the river that I began to understand what Ali Farka had been trying to tell me during the trip to his farm.

We were coasting towards the shore, the sun was glinting off the sand dunes that lined the river, and the hot wind was whipping up ripples in the green water lapping at the canoe.

Sitting on a wooden strut, staring out at the river, Ali Farka picked up his guitar and began to play.

nstantly his face lit up with a huge and irrepressible smile. The tune was Hawa Dolo, from his album The Source.

He said all his music came from the depths of the Niger, from the river spirit he called Jimbala.

Then he finally used words to explain why he had come home to stay.

"This life is better," he said. "That other life was a bit like dried dung; it didn't stick to my shoes. Whatever I produce it stays here.

"If God gives me big buildings in the United States or Canada or Japan or Sydney or Germany, can I put them in my pocket and bring them back? No, it's impossible."

He said he was working to improve the life of his family and to live in solidarity with others.

"If I eat, they eat. What I drink, they drink. What I wear, they wear. And I live with the river all the time," he said.

Still picking out haunting melodies on his guitar, he added: "Without the river spirit I would be deaf and have no voice. I would cease to be."

The world has lost a great voice and a generous spirit.


Ali Farka Touré: Brilliant African guitarist who won international fame and influence without ever losing touch with his roots
The Times Online (UK)

Whenever Ali Farka Touré was asked to state his profession, his preferred response was that he was a farmer. He owned and cultivated extensive lands in Mali in the semi-desert region of Niafunké, where in later years he was also the mayor. But he also happened to be arguably the finest guitarist Africa has ever produced.

A virtuoso on both the acoustic and electric instruments, he won a Grammy award in 1994 for Talking Timbuktu, his collaborative album with the American guitarist Ry Cooder, and he had just won another with Toumani Diabaté, for their In the Heart of the Moon. Touré’s intricate, fluid playing was acclaimed by such Western rock guitar legends as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, who were often seen in the audience at his concerts.

He was in his late forties before he found himself lionised by a Western audience and began performing in some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. Yet even after his international success, he retained not only his African dress but also his ancient tribal beliefs and customs. Whatever his Western managers, agents and record company executives proposed, they knew that he would consult the spirits of his ancestors before he accepted their more earthbound advice.


Born Ali Ibrahim in 1939 in the village of Kanau on the banks of the River Niger in northwest Mali, he never knew his exact date of birth. The tenth son born to parents who claimed noble descent, he was the first to survive infancy and as a child acquired the nickname Farka, meaning donkey and indicating not slow-wittedness but strength and tenacity. When he was still a boy his father died while serving in the French Army and he moved with his mother further south along the river to Niafunk é, the village that, apart from a few years spent in the capital, Bamako, in the 1970s, was his home for the rest of his life.

Brought up as a devout Muslim, he had no formal schooling and spent his childhood farming. But in Mali Islam co-exists with an older belief system that holds that under the waters of the River Niger there is a world of spirits called ghimbala or djinns who control both the spiritual and temporal world.

At a young age he became mesmerised by the music played at spirit ceremonies in the villages along the banks of the Niger. Through the power of music it is believed that the spirits can possess those present and those who have the gift to communicate with the djinns are called “children of the river”. Influenced by a grandmother who was a famous priestess in the region, Ali was deemed to be such a child and his interest in the music of the spirits led him at the age of 12 to fashion his first instrument, a single-string traditional West African guitar known as a djerkel, which many years later he presented to Cooder.

For a time he planned on becoming a priest, not in his Islamic faith but in the local djinn-based religion, before he eventually decided the powers of the spirit world were too dangerous to meddle with. “These spirits can be good or bad to you, so I decided just to sing about them,” he explained many years later. “But it’s our culture, so we can’t pass it by.” As a teenager he worked variously as an apprentice to a tailor, a taxi driver, car mechanic and a pilot on the river, while continuing to play music in ceremonies and for pleasure, mastering a number of traditional instruments.

At the age of 17 he saw a performance by the touring National Ballet of Guinea, whose orchestra featured a Western guitar. The experience left a lasting impression and he was soon learning to play on a borrowed guitar. When Mali gained independence from its French colonial rulers in 1960, the new Government established professional arts troupes in each of Mali’s administrative regions and two years later Touré joined the Niafunké district troupe, singing and playing guitar in a huge group of musicians and dancers that numbered more than 100. Yet it was not until 1968 that he was able to buy his own guitar, when he travelled to Bulgaria to represent Mali at an international arts festival and purchased a cheap Soviet model.

In 1970 he moved to Bamako, taking a job at the national radio station as an engineer and playing in the Radio Mali orchestra. His guitar playing on the airwaves brought him attention and acclaim across Mali and, encouraged by the response, he sent recordings of the broadcasts to a record company in Paris. It led to the release of his first album and six more followed between 1974 and 1979, each of which was recorded in Mali and the tapes then sent to Paris.


His tradition-based music also began to reflect subtle elements of outside influences, including the American soul of singers such as James Brown and Otis Redding, the jazz of Jimmy Smith and the blues of John Lee Hooker. It was not so much that he imitated any of them, more that he claimed to recognise African roots in all three forms and derived confidence and affirmation of his own art from the fact. In 1980 he returned to Niafunké to work on his land and did not travel again for another seven years. By then the reputation of his 1970s albums and the mid-1980s “world music” boom had made him a cult figure among European audiences and, in 1987, the British promoter Ann Hunt travelled to Bamako to find him. She eventually tracked him down in Niafunké after Radio Mali broadcast an appeal for him to get in touch with her, and his first tour of Britain and Europe followed. It was only the second time in his life that he had left Mali and his guitar mastery and charismatic presence made him an instant success everywhere he played.

That same year the London-based World Circuit label issued his first self-titled recording made outside Africa. The River — a reference to the spirit world beneath the River Niger — followed in 1990 and three years later came The Source, which included guest appearances by the American bluesman Taj Mahal and the British-Asian fusionist, Nitin Sawhney. These records established him as one of the biggest African names on the European and American world music scene, but even better was to come when, in 1993, he travelled to Los Angeles to record an album of guitar duets with Ry Cooder. Their collaboration proved to be inspired and on its release the following year the resulting album, Talking Timbuktu, won a Grammy award and established Ali not merely as a great African artist but one of the world’s foremost guitarists in any genre.

Ironically, at almost exactly the same time as Talking Timbuktu was making him an international star, he developed an increasing reluctance to leave his farm. As a result he did not make another album for five years, when the World Circuit owner Nick Gold, who had despaired of ever getting him back into a Western studio, travelled to Niafunké with a mobile recording unit. Sessions, in an abandoned school, were fitted in between the demands of tending his crops and the resulting album, Niafunké, was released to more rave reviews in 1999. Four years later he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s documentary film Feel Like Going Home, which traced the history of the blues from the Mississippi Delta back to the banks of the Niger. Once again, the film director was forced to travel to Mali to find him.

In 2005 he released his first recordings in six years on In the Heart of the Moon, a wonderful album of guitar and kora duets, recorded in Bamako with Toumani Diabaté, widely regarded as the finest player of the West African harp-like instrument. The same year he also played his first European concerts in five years and began work on a new solo album, by which time he had been elected mayor of the Niafunké region as a representative of the URD party (Union for the Republic and Democracy).


Malian Guitarist Was Hailed
in U.S. as the 'Desert Bluesman'
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
The Los Angeles Times

Before the blues arrived in the Mississippi Delta, it lived in the desert of Mali, West Africa, and was known by a different name.

The sound of Ali Farka Toure was like the DNA that proved the paternity of the music, a link between the people and places that claimed it as their own.

"I've stayed in the tradition, and they've evolved in exile," he said of African American bluesmen who observers wrongly assumed had influenced his playing. "It's very important that these musicians go back to Africa to see where the music comes from, because in that way they'll find the origins, the roots of their music."

Toure, the two time-Grammy Award winner, the musician dubbed "the desert bluesman" and hailed by many as Africa's finest guitarist, died in his sleep Tuesday of bone cancer at his home in Mali. Though Toure did not know the exact date of his birth, he believed his age to be 67.

"It's impossible to calculate the importance of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and now Ali Farka Toure," Bonnie Raitt, who played with Toure, told The Times on Tuesday. "He's a giant."

News of his death came as friend and executive producer Nick Gold was set to travel to Mali to deliver a Grammy Award that Toure and fellow musician Toumani Diabate won last month for "In the Heart of the Moon," said Dave McGuire, spokesman for World Circuit Records, Toure's London-based label.

The death of Mali's beloved son — a farmer turned musician and cultural ambassador, who was later appointed mayor of his village — was the cause for mourning: Radio and television stations played his music.

The Malian president was expected to participate in a tribute to Toure at the musician's house, McGuire said. Toure is survived by a wife and many children.

Guitarist Ry Cooder, who collaborated with Toure on a Grammy-Award winning CD "Talking Timbuktu," said Toure carried a sense of connection with the past, one that guided rather than limited his music.

He played an instrument known as a djerkel, a one-string guitar, and played traditional music on an electric guitar.

He was "highly conscious of the presence of the ancestors," Cooder said. "I asked him one time … 'Especially when you're playing music, where are they?' He said, 'They're just behind me and above my head.' I said, 'How many?' He said, 'A thousand years of ancestors.' "

Ali Ibrahim Toure was born in 1939, in the village of Kanau in northwest Mali, the 10th son of his mother but the first to survive infancy. For his strength and tenacity, for surviving, the family nicknamed him "Farka," which means donkey.

If Toure had abided strictly by tradition and culture, he might have never touched an instrument. Born into a noble family, he was expected to become a farmer or an artisan. As a boy he farmed and was an apprentice to a tailor, but music was his calling; the spirit ceremonies in villages along the banks of the Niger River, the sound of the instruments, mesmerized him.

When he was 12, he made a djerkel and taught himself to play. It was the spirits, he later said, who gave him the gift of his talent. Years later, a performance by Guinean guitarist Keita Fodeba changed his life: "That's when I swore I would become a guitarist. I didn't know his guitar, but I liked it a lot. I felt I had as much music as him and that I could translate it."

Under a government program to promote national culture, Toure worked with an art troupe, composing, playing guitar and singing. He earned a reputation as a traditional musician in the 1960s, playing the flute and n'goni, a traditional instrument, on Radio Mali, and later guitar. Eventually he sent his recordings to the Son Afric record company in Paris.

By the late 1980s, Toure was playing for European and U.S. audiences — and though his repertoire included much more than the music that earned him the moniker "desert bluesman," it was that sound that startled listeners and drew comparisons to the likes of John Lee Hooker.

"He was the first guy to really give us sort of the African take on the blues and give us a glimpse of where the blues comes from," said Tom Schnabel, producer of Cafe L.A. on KCRW-FM (89.9) and program director for World Music for the L.A. Philharmonic.

Though a fan of blues and soul music, he was not, he said, influenced by the music; he did, however, recognize the sound as belonging to Mali.

"I just was knocked over by the obvious roots of the blues," Raitt said.

The sound that usually is associated with sadness, longing and grief, in Toure's hands is "very soul-connecting. It's erotic and spiritual at the same time," Raitt said.

For Toure, the substance of the music was "more important than the formation of the song, the melody or the rhythm."

"My music is an education, a history, a legend, an autobiography. It tells a valuable story of something true," he told The Times in 1993.

His 1994 collaboration with Cooder, "Talking Timbuktu," helped expand the U.S. public's awareness of Toure's music, Raitt said. It earned a Grammy Award.

The unique sound was a result of his willingness to take traditional music and push it forward, layering his own personality.

With his success, Toure could have left Mali and lived well in Paris, said Nnamdi Moweta, host of Radio Afrodicia on KPFK-FM (90.7).

Instead, his fame helped him help others. He took care of many people in his village and was deeply proud of and concerned about his nation.

"People looked at him like a peacemaker," during a 1999 conflict in Mali, Moweta said. "He was singing in all the people's languages: Songhai, Fulani and Tamashek. He used the music as a weapon to bring peace. People listened, and at that time that was what was needed, for people to listen."


Ali Farka Touré, Grammy-Winning Musician of West Africa, Dies
By Jon Pareles
The New York Times

Ali Farka Touré, the self-taught Malian guitarist and songwriter who merged West African traditions with the blues and carried his music to a worldwide audience, winning two Grammy Awards, died in his sleep on Monday at his farm in the village of Niafunke in northwestern Mali, the Ministry of Culture of Mali announced.

He was either 66 or 67; he was born in 1939 but he did not know his birth date. His record company, World Circuit Records, said he had suffered from bone cancer.

Mr. Touré's deep grounding in Malian traditions made him one of African music's most profound innovators. "Mali is first and foremost a library of the history of African music," he said in a 2005 interview with the world-music magazine Fly. "It is also the sharing of history, legend, biography of Africa."

In Mali he was considered a national hero. At the news of his death, government radio stations there suspended regular programming to play his music.

Mr. Touré collaborated widely, winning Grammys for albums he made with the American guitarist Ry Cooder ("Talking Timbuktu" in 1994) and with the Malian griot Toumani Diabaté ("In the Heart of the Moon," 2005). He also recorded with the American bluesman Taj Mahal.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Cooder said: "It's important for a traditional performer to be coming from a place and tradition, and most people who are like that tend to be part of their scene rather than transcendent of their scene. That's what their calling is all about. But Ali was a seeker. There was powerful psychology there. He was not governed by anything. He was free to move about in his mind."

Mr. Touré forged connections between the hypnotic modal riffs of Malian songs and the driving one-chord boogie of American bluesmen like John Lee Hooker; he mingled the plucked patterns of traditional songs with the aggressive lead-guitar lines of rock. He sang in various West African languages — his own Sonrai as well as Songhai, Bambara, Peul, Tamasheck and others — reflecting the traditional foundations of the songs he wrote. His lyrics, in West African style, represented the conscience of a community, urging listeners to work hard, honor the past and act virtuously.

Mr. Touré was his family's 10th child, and the first to survive infancy. "Farka," a nickname, means "donkey," an animal praised for its tenacity. No information was available on his immediate survivors.

Unlike many West African musicians, Mr. Touré was not born into a musical dynasty; rather, he was drawn to music despite the wishes of his family. Hearing the music of spirit ceremonies, he taught himself to play the njurkle, a one-stringed West African lute, in 1950, then the n'jarka, a one-stringed fiddle, and later the n'goni, a four-stringed lute.

When he was about 13, after an encounter with a snake, he suffered attacks he believed to have been caused by contact with the spirit world. Sent away for a year to be cured, he returned as someone who was recognized for the ability to communicate with spirits. "I have all the spirits," he wrote in liner notes to the collection "Radio Mali" (World Circuit/Nonesuch). "I work the spirits and I work with the spirits."

After seeing the Guinean guitarist Keita Fodeba, he took up the guitar in the mid-1950's and joined a local band. Mali became independent of France in 1960, and in 1962 Mr. Touré became the leader of the Niafunke village cultural troupe, dedicated to preserving local culture. At the same time, he was listening to American soul, blues and funk, which he heard as rooted in the music of West Africa.

In 1970 Mr. Touré moved to Bamako, the nation's capital, where he became an engineer at Radio Mali and a frequent performer on the air. Six albums of music recorded at Radio Mali were released in France in the 1970's. In 1980, he returned to his hometown, Niafunke, and established a farm that he tended between musical engagements. He toured Africa widely, establishing a reputation across West Africa.

In 1987 he performed in Britain and began recording for international release with "Ali Farka Touré" (World Circuit/Nonesuch). The stark propulsion of his music, and its hints of electric blues, made him a star on the world-music circuit, and he toured the United States, Europe and Japan.

Around 2000 he retired from touring to return to his farm. He often said that he considered himself a farmer above all, and in 2004 he was elected mayor of the 53 villages of the Niafunke region. He established the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, nurturing younger Malian musicians, and he continued to perform in Mali. But he still made occasional international forays; his final concert was last year at a festival in Nice, France.


Ali Farka Toure; Musician From Mali
By Matt Schudel
The Washington Post

Ali Farka Toure, a guitarist and singer from Mali whose music had strong parallels with American blues, died of bone cancer March 7 at his home in the Malian capital of Bamako. He was believed to be 66 or 67.

Mr. Toure, who considered himself primarily a farmer, won two Grammy Awards for his haunting and spirited recordings of the music of his West African homeland. Wearing brightly printed robes and sandals, he took his country's culture to Europe, Japan and the United States in tours during the past 20 years. He mixed native and western instruments and left audiences across the world marveling at the subtle power of his music.

With its stuttering guitar rhythms repeated over a single chord, half-spoken vocals and lively bursts of energy, his music reminded some of the Mississippi blues styles of John Lee Hooker and R.L. Burnside. In fact, when Mr. Toure first heard a Hooker recording in the 1960s, he thought he was hearing a form of Malian music. He once performed with Hooker in concert but always took pains to point out the differences between his music and that of his American counterparts.

"I am the root," he said. "They are the branches."

Mr. Toure spent most of his life in the remote Malian town of Niafunke, a 20-hour drive across the desert from the capital. He worked as a chauffeur, taxi driver, mechanic, riverboat pilot and sound engineer over the years but eventually became a farmer, raising cattle and growing rice and fruit. He became a prominent citizen and in 2004 was appointed mayor of his home town.

He often said he was retiring from music to devote himself to farm life, but he always returned to the stage and the studio. His most recent recording, "In the Heart of the Moon" (2005), won a Grammy last month for traditional world music album of the year.

"Music is not just for amusement," he said in 1995. "It should be used for spiritual purposes and to educate. In this way, I have many responsibilities to my family, to my village and to society."

The precise year of Ali Ibrahim Toure's birth is not known. In a 1993 interview, he said he was 55. At a concert at New York's Town Hall in 2000, he said he was 61.

In any case, he was born near Timbuktu, Mali, and was his parents' 10th child but the first to survive childhood. For that reason he acquired the nickname Farka, or donkey, for his stubbornness.

He was not a member of the traditional griot class of musicians and storytellers but nonetheless taught himself to play the gurkel , a single-string guitar, and the n'jarka , a single-string fiddle. Later, after hearing the Guinean musician Keita Fodeba, he learned to play guitar.

After Mali declared its independence from France in 1960, Mr. Toure became part of a state-sponsored musical group, Troupe 117, that was popular throughout the country. In the late 1960s, he began to listen in earnest to American artists, including Hooker, Otis Redding and Ray Charles, and found an affinity with the style if not always with the substance of their music.

"In what you call the blues, I have heard people singing of their hardships," Mr. Toure said, "but to me this is a very small thing to tell people of; it has no great significance."

His own songs tended to be about love, spiritual life and the land and rivers of Mali. He sang in nine African languages, always keeping the musical idioms of each style distinct.

"My music is an education, a history, a legend, an autobiography -- it all tells a valuable story of something true," he said. "Different songs are inspired by different ethnic groups. . . . Often if you try and sing a song in a different language, it will not work."

Mr. Toure recorded for French labels and began to perform in Europe in the 1980s. He reached the U.S. market in 1989 with a self-titled album. In 1992, he made a recording with American musicians Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, "The Source," which was No. 1 on Billboard's world music chart for 11 weeks. Mr. Toure teamed with Cooder on another album, "Talking Timbuktu," which won a Grammy award in 1995.

In recent years, when Mr. Toure grew reluctant to travel, he recorded in a mobile studio in Mali. Once, while driving to a recording session, Mr. Toure paused to shoot rabbits "for dinner," he said. He continued to perform in Africa and France until last year.

Survivors include three wives, 11 children and many grandchildren.

"Everyone has a responsibility to the community," Mr. Toure said. "As a musician, I have received a gift from God. It is my obligation to share this gift. We have a saying in Mali: Honey does not taste good in one mouth alone."


Star Ali Farka Toure to be buried
BBC News Online

One of Africa's best known musicians, Ali Farka Toure, is to be buried in his home town of Niafunke in northern Mali, after he died of cancer on Tuesday.

Earlier, a ceremony is to be held to pay respects to one of the pioneers of "Mali Blues" at the airport in the capital, Bamako.

Toure, who was in his late 60s, won two Grammy awards for his work.

In 2004, he was elected mayor of Niafunke and helped build roads and develop farms in the desert region.

Mali's president, prime minister and figures in the music industry have been paying their respects to Toure.

"A monument has fallen. With the death of Ali Farka Toure, Mali is losing one of it's greatest ambassadors," television producer Mbaye Boubacar Diarra told the AP news agency.

Although he has worked with several US blues guitarists, the "Bluesman of Africa" always insisted that the music had its roots in the traditional sounds of northern Mali, rather than the southern United States.

Malian journalist Sadio Kante says Toure was better known abroad than in his home country.

Toure won one of his Grammys just weeks before his death for his album in collaboration with another famous Malian musician, Toumani Diabate, In the Heart of the Moon.

He won the other in 1994 with US guitarist Ry Cooder for the widely acclaimed Talking Timbuktu.

His record label, World Circuit, said he had just finished work on a new solo album.

He was born in Timbuktu in 1939 but the exact date of his birth is not known.

"For some people, Timbuktu is a place at the end of nowhere," he was once quoted as saying.

"But that's not true, I'm from Timbuktu, and I can tell you that it's right in the centre of the world."

As a friend wrote earlier:"The griots are moving to the other world."

She made this statement in reference to the recent death of Octavia Butler, and today's news that both Gordon Parks and Ali Farka Toure passed on on Tuesday.

The text about Parks was posted to nmazca.blog in December 2002. The story about Toure was written and posted on this site last June.



"...Struck by the faces of dust bowl refugees in these [FSA] pictures, and hounded by bigotry himself, [Gordon] Parks came to understand how to fight the poverty and racism of his past. He chose photography as his principal 'weapon' and spent $7.50 on a pawn-shop camera.* He then fell into the Puget Sound off Seattle making his first amateur photographs of seagulls..."

From the Tacoma Art Museum's brochure for Half Past Autumn, which I took in (on two big floors; well more than 100 prints) this afternoon...

* At the time, Parks was 25/26. He began to shoot for Life Magazine at 36. It was amazing to me that so much happened for him/he undertook so much after he turned 30... and that he didn't even have a camera until he was 25!

See The Films & Photography of Gordon Parks Sr. for just a slice about his productive career.



I first heard Ali Farka Toure play in 1998, by way of a CD that I dredged up from the cheapo bin at a video 'n' music store in Gallup, New Mexico. "Oh, some African music. That'll be nice" were my thoughts at the time. Little did I know...

As I played the disc, I was soon drawn in by the utter familiarity of the rhythms and lyrics -- despite the fact that the songs were sung in West African dialects.* This was music that I'd heard before, and which was brought up memories from deep within the transpersonal databanks.

Never mind the plug-ins;buy some plants

"It is suggested that one [large] houseplant should be allowed for approximately 10 square yards of floor space, assuming average ceiling heights of 8 to 9 feet. This means that you need two or three plants to contribute to good air quality in the average domestic living room of about 20 to 25 square yards.

"Research has shown that these 10 plants are the most effective all-around in counteracting off-gassed chemicals and contributing to balanced internal humidity:

Areca palm
Reed palm
Dwarf date palm
Boston fern
Janet Craig dracaena
English ivy
Australian sword fern
Peace Lily
Rubber plant
Weeping fig"

Khamsa/Hamsa/Humsa

Otherwise known as the Hand of Fatima:


"Originating in the Middle East, the [Khamsa/Hamsa Hand] represents God's protective hand, and the blue eye on it shields its owner from the curse of the Evil Eye. The Hand's positive energy draws happiness, riches and health.

"A talisman that charms against the Evil Eye takes different forms in each culture where the belief is common. In Turkey and adjacent areas of Greece (eastern Mediterranean and Aegean), the 'Evil Eye' is conceived of as blue. Thus, in order to repel or prevent the effect of 'Evil Eye', a reflective 'eye' of blue glass is used."

Astrophotos by Russell Croman

Bubble Nebula

The artwork of Daniel Phill

Kalo

Octavia Estelle Butler, 1947-2006

Updated 7:12 p.m., March 6

"I'm not writing for some noble purpose, I just like telling a good story. If what I write about helps others understand this world we live in, so much the better for all of us."

The Pasadena City Library had selected "Kindred" for its One City, One Story series before Butler's death.


"Octavia E. Butler's first creation
in the world of science fiction was herself."

Octavia Butler, 58;
Author Opened the Galaxies
of Science Fiction to Blacks
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
The Los Angeles Times
February 28, 2006

Before anybody told her that black girls do not grow up to write about futuristic worlds, Butler, the daughter of a shoeshine man and a maid, was already fashioning a place for herself in a white-dominated universe.

By remaining dedicated to her craft, sweeping floors and working as a telemarketer to pay the bills; by suffering the indignities that come with being among the first; and eventually winning a MacArthur Foundation grant, Butler carved a place for herself — and helped write a new world into existence.

Butler, whose 12 stunning, thought-provoking novels of science fiction inspired new readers and writers to explore the genre, died Saturday. Friends said Butler apparently suffered a stroke outside her home in Seattle. She was 58.

Over the years, Butler, author of the seminal work "Kindred," earned the distinction of being the first lady of a small, tightknit circle of African American writers of speculative fiction — science fiction, horror and fantasy.

"She was an utter inspiration," said Steven Barnes, a longtime friend and science fiction author who was the first African American to write one of the novels based on "Star Wars." "I don't know what would have happened to me had I not had her as an example."

Mystery writer Walter Mosley said Butler expanded the genre "by writing a kind of fiction that African American women around the country could read and understand both technically and emotionally…. She wasn't writing romance or feel-good novels, she was writing very difficult, brilliant work."

"For an African American woman to somehow define herself as a science fiction writer and to realize that dream is an extraordinary thing," he said in an interview Monday.

"Kindred" is the story of a 20th century African American woman who travels in time back to the antebellum South to save her great-great-grandfather, a white plantation owner. Though published under the general banner of fiction, it exemplifies Butler's use of speculative ideas to explore issues such as the relationship between the empowered and the powerless.

In the worlds that Butler created, African Americans and other people of color were present and significant in ways they had not been before. That inclusion not only attracted readers, it allowed Butler to use the genre as a powerful means of speaking to a range of issues including race, gender and the environment while also mastering the tenets of science fiction writing.

Dan Simon, founder of the publishing house Seven Stories, said Butler's readers — a body as diverse as the worlds she created — felt a relationship with her work that was deeply personal and startling.

"There was an intensity to the way people read her that is very unusual," said Simon, who was Butler's editor. "You always feel when reading her that you're looking in a mirror that gives you an even truer reflection than any mirror ever could."

In a brief autobiography, Butler described herself simply: "I'm comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of a large city, a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive."

Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena and known to family and friends as Junie. She spent part of her childhood on her grandmother's chicken farm near Victorville, where there was no electricity, telephone or running water, but to Butler it was idyllic.

Early in her life, Butler found refuge in her writing — a place where there was freedom from whatever troubled her. "The major tragedies in life, there's just no compensation," Butler told The Times in 1998. "But the minor ones you can always write about. It's my way of dealing, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper than psychiatrists. The story, you see, will get you through."

At the age of 4 she created stories about a magical horse; she was the horse. As a 10-year-old, she was already putting those stories down on paper. By the time an aunt told her "Honey, Negroes can't be writers," it was too late. At 13, Butler was already tapping out new worlds on a Remington portable typewriter that her mother had purchased.